Energy, whether measured in calories, gallons, watts, or volts, is a truly magnificent thing. It literally brings objects to life. It makes the bees buzz. It makes the flowers bloom. It illuminates cities at night. It even allows us to fly through the sky, side by side with the birds.
There is, however, a serious but often-overlooked downside to energy’s power: it only comes in limited amounts. It is especially easy is it to forget this fundamental law of nature in a world where food, electricity and transportation are all abundantly available, but as resources dwindle, we may soon be reminded of just how precious energy really is.
Every species on earth is dependent on energy for survival, and nearly all of this energy, believe it or not, comes from a single source: the sun.
Plants take in solar energy; animals feed on the plants; animals eat other animals; insects and microorganisms feed on the leftovers; and the soil, freshly fertilized by the remains, gives birth to new plants. This process repeats itself over and over, delicately balancing every ecosystem on the planet with a constant, yet limited, stream of solar energy…at least that is how the world worked before human beings began cheating the system.
Unlike any other species, mankind has devised several unorthodox methods for obtaining energy outside of the standard food chain, allowing us to continually expand our population, both in numbers and in geography.
We discovered how to create fire, allowing us to survive in the cold and cook our food. We exploited animals for energy-efficient labor. We built mills to harness the power of wind and running water. We formulated gunpowder and firearms for easier hunting. We invented a way to use steam for propulsion.
Then, with the introduction of fossil fuels during the late 19th and early 20th century, man went from cheating the laws of nature to shredding the rulebook completely.
Packed full of millions of years’ worth of stored solar power, fossil fuels—mainly coal, oil, and natural gas—have provided us with a seemingly endless supply of life’s necessities. Bestowing upon us massive amounts of everything from food, to housing, to heating and cooling, to refrigeration, to electricity, fossil power has essentially lifted the limits nature imposes on all other species.
From the dawn of man up until the year 1804, the human population never rose above one billion people. Nature would simply not allow it. Thanks to fossil fuels, however, more than 6.6 billion people now inhabit the planet. In just the past fifteen years the population grew over a billion, more than it did during the first approximate 200,000 years of man’s entire existence!
Those of us raised during this period of explosive growth often presume, quite naturally, that there is no limit to the industrial and technological phenomenon unfolding all around us. But make no mistake, the lifeblood that makes it all possible is a nonrenewable, irreplaceable resource.
Energy only comes in limited amounts, even when you cheat the system.
Our civilization is consuming fossil energy at a far faster rate than the planet is producing it. After all, what takes the earth millions of years to create can be burned in a single commute to work.
Discoveries of new oil fields have been falling for the past fifty years, all while demand has continued to skyrocket. The only thing keeping us afloat thus far has been the surplus of yesteryear’s discoveries; but, as we are quickly learning, there is nothing to replace the old fields as they begin to dry out.
The world is now inevitably approaching an irreversible decline in oil production. There will soon be less energy available to support our energy-dependent society.
“The period of time during which humans will have discovered petroleum, reshaped their societies to make use of it, and then exhausted nature’s supply promises to last little more than two centuries total,” remarks Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute, an educational think-tank focusing on energy and environmental issues.
Heinberg, also an author and core faculty member at the New College of California, is especially concerned about the consequences depleting fossil fuels will have on the world’s food security. Every calorie of food we consume, he points out, requires an average of ten to fifteen calories of fossil fuel energy to produce.
“It is not difficult to imagine the likely agricultural consequences of dramatic price hikes for the gasoline or diesel fuel used to run farm machinery or to transport food long distances, or for nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides made from oil and natural gas,” he explains.
This begs the question: If industrial agriculture is able to support a population of more than 6.6 billion, how many people will post-industrial agriculture be able to support? A logical estimate, as Heinberg and others note, would be this: as many as were supported before agriculture was industrialized, or somewhat fewer than two billion people.
Regardless of the exact figure, it seems future energy supplies will only be able to sustain a fraction of the current population. There is no alternative or combination of alternative resources that will ever be able to match the efficiency and former abundance of fossil power.
One would therefore presume that managing the planet’s remaining food and energy resources would be an extremely delicate issue, worthy of the utmost attention from scientific experts and world leaders. Unfortunately, nearly every energy proposal put forth so far has been shortsighted, counterproductive, and hopelessly aimed at finding replacements for fossil fuels instead of developing effective strategies for using less of them.
Take, for instance, the so-called “ethanol miracle” currently being supported by leaders from both political parties.
Incorrectly touted by advocates as a “renewable alternative” to gasoline, ethanol derived from grain requires an inordinate amount of fossil fuel and fertile land to produce. Some scientists even argue it requires more energy to produce than it contains.
Despite this fact, ethanol production is taking off and is projected to consume more than half of the U.S. corn crop by the year 2008!
According to Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, even if the entire U.S. grain harvest were used to produce ethanol, it would still only satisfy about 16 percent of total U.S. demand for fuel. According to Brown, the amount of grain needed to fill an SUV’s gas tank with ethanol, just once, could feed a person for a full year.
Keep in mind more than 25,000 people die of starvation every single day, a figure that—as noted earlier—is sure to grow as energy supplies become increasingly scarce.
“We are facing an epic competition,” Brown explains, “between the 800 million motorists who want to protect their mobility and the two billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive.”
For a relatively brief period of time, fossil fuels expanded the carrying capacity of the planet, but we have now reached the threshold. Either we starve people to fuel cars or we drive less and pay more for gas, which we will eventually have to do anyway.
Using fossil fuels to overcome nature’s limitations may be man’s most monumental achievement, but nature has rules for a reason. They provide balance and order to an otherwise chaotic system.
Whether we realize it tomorrow or a decade from now, the one true cure to our energy addiction will be learning to live with less, not manufacturing more.
Nature always has the last word.
